ProPublica pulls together the best analyses of the decision. From a layman’s point of view, here’s what I think it means: Legislatures and courts represent equal branches of government, so typically judges make an assumption of good faith when they analyze a law. In other words, judges assume the legislature is trying to do what it says it is trying to do, and they read the law within that frame.

However, there are certain situations where legislatures again and again have passed bad-faith laws. Racial discrimination has been the biggest example; for decades the rationales kept changing, but the results were always that the races stayed separate and minority races drew the short straw. Eventually, the Supreme Court developed the levels-of-scrutiny doctrine that allowed it to reject consistent legislative bad faith.

That doctrine has never applied to abortion laws, but the Texas law in this case is a classic bad-faith law: It purports to be about women’s health, but the actual intent is to impose so many hard-to-satisfy regulations on abortion clinics that most of them would go out of business. Outside the big cities, that would make abortions so hard to get in Texas that women without much support or many resources just wouldn’t be able to get them.

The Court’s decision never uses the phrase bad faith, but that’s what the decision is about. The Court has finally lost patience with bad-faith regulation of abortion clinics. Bad-faith anti-abortion laws all over the country should start coming down.

and Elie Wiesel

I’ve been looking for the perfect Elie Wiesel retrospective and not finding it. I never met Wiesel or even saw him speak in person, but he came to symbolize two important things for me.

First, in regard to the dark side of life, we all have a narrow path to walk: To one side is denial, the temptation to say that because the bad things are not happening to me, at least not at the moment, they aren’t real. They won’t happen because they don’t happen and they haven’t happened, even if some people say they did. To the other side is the temptation to dismiss or debunk all higher values, and so give in to cynicism, bitterness, or depression. Wiesel, to me, represents the hope that it is possible to walk that path without sliding off in either direction: We don’t have to whitewash the world to love it, or imagine that people are wonderful in order to have compassion for them.

In terms of religion, to me Wiesel represented a balance between traditional religious values and modern humanism. He often talked about God, but never simplistically or dogmatically. The one clear thing the Holocaust had taught him was that God cannot be counted on to save us. If the world is to avoid spiraling into ever deeper darkness, human beings will have to step up and see to it.

Bernard Avishai’s Wiesel piece in The New Yorker starts well, but ends up focusing on Wiesel’s reluctance to confront Israel about its treatment of the Palestinians. I get where he’s coming from and agree with him on the substance, but I have more of a nobody’s-perfect reaction. I hope for a more generous response when I die, so I feel obligated to extend that generosity to others.

but not enough people are paying attention to this article

Most progressives regret NAFTA, feel an instant antipathy to any action of the WTO, and oppose ratification of the TPP. At the same time, it’s one of those obvious Econ-101 truths that trade is good. Just as no individual can hope to be self-sufficient at a level much above subsistence, no country can truly prosper by cutting itself off from the rest of the world.

So a blanket opposition to any and all trade agreements can’t be the right progressive position. If only someone would lay out some general principles of a positive progressive trade policy. Well, Jared Bernstein is taking a whack at it.

and you might also be interested in

Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Well, three decades after countries started banning the chemicals destroying it, the ozone layer is on the mend, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

He offers three different models, one based only on polls, one based on other factors like economic data, and a third projecting what would happen if the election were today. (Look in his left-hand column for the buttons that choose the model.) They allow you to look at different kinds of uncertainty. The if-today model, which he calls the Now-cast, only reflects the uncertainties in polling: If the election were held today, a candidate who has Hillary’s current lead in the polls would win 85.5% of the time. The other two models also reflect uncertainties of events, what we might call the shit-happens factor. Polls in June can only tell you so much about what will happen in November, which is what gets Clinton’s win probability down to 80.3% in polls-only and 73.5% in polls-plus.

The models are constructed in such a way that they will converge by election day.

While we’re on polls, the NYT’s Nate Cohn talks about the different assumptions and corrections that can go into polls, and how they can go wrong. In a separate article, Cohn discusses conspiracy theories about vote fraud:

There are plenty of good reasons for people to think the U.S. election system doesn’t work, even if there are basically zero reasons to think it’s “rigged” or that there’s multistate election fraud.

I’m not sure how I missed “I’m Angry! So I’m Voting For Donald Trump” when it came out three months ago, but it’s still accurate. At the time, Klavan’s eventual conclusion to “vote for someone else, who would be, like, a better president” probably meant some other Republican. (The Daily Wire is a conservative web site, after all.) But it works just as well for Hillary.

Governor Jerry Brown just signed a slew of new gun-control laws in California. To me the most interesting one is the ban on magazines that hold more than 10 bullets, because it requires gun-owners to do something specific: turn those magazines in or otherwise dispose of them. I wonder how many will comply, and how aggressively California will enforce the law.

George W. Bush was historically unpopular when he left office, but his fans claimed that history would vindicate him. (I argued against that view.) So far, not so much. Noted presidential biographer Jean Edward Smith (whose previous books made the case that Eisenhower and Grant were under-appreciated) has a new book Bush, which ends with this line:

Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.

That doesn’t sound much like vindication.

and let’s close with something awesome

Earth isn’t the only planet to have an aurora phenomenon. Here, the Hubble space telescope spies one on Jupiter.

Expect gobs of amazing Jupiter photos this week as the Juno probe arrives.

Comments

Juno and Jupiter! Ah, yes. A cracking good video is worth at least $6
billion. Can’t think of any way the money could be better spent Two hundred from now when the next empire is considering the failures of the old ones, people will be talking about the great shrines left behind — the pyramids, the Acropolis, Great Wall of China and the pictures of the planets. Them planets, goooood lookin’

I’m not convinced that your less-of-a-reaction to deaths in “other” places represents “implicit bigotry.” Bigotry entails disrespect. But there are other possible reasons for the lesser reaction. Humans are wired to care for “our own” (family, friends, community, people we know, people like us) and it’s only natural to do so. Personally I find myself reacting more strongly to tragedy in the USA and to countries where I’ve been. So tragedy in Israel or Turkey, for me, hits “closer to home” than tragedy in Sudan. That doesn’t mean I’m biased against Sudanese people; I have no ideas about them at all, having never met one.

That being said, if we want to solve the world’s problems we do have to find some way of caring about people who are not “close to home.” One thing that works for me is seeing people’s faces and hearing their stories.

Compassion and understanding are universal when they become real to us – whether through pictures, action, or words. As our world becomes interconnected in so many ways, it will become more important that we make a personal effort to get outside our own small world and apply the levels of caring and understanding that transcend country, race, ethnicity, etc.

On that article on progressive trade policy… I’d encourage you to consider that progressives have succumbed to mass hysteria on this topic and turned the TPP into a caricature of itself in their own heads.

I’m as green a socialist lefty as they come, but I think those who actually understand the TPP and what it’s about, such as Obama and smart, level-headed progressive journalists like Ezra Klein, see no reason not to support it. Obama is as sharp as they come and better informed than any of us, so what makes you think you wouldn’t agree with him if you were equally well informed? (This isn’t an argument that we should always agree with Obama, just that we should seriously consider deferring to him on complex issues like trade where he likely understands more about the ramifications of various policy options than we do.)

The whole ISDS thing is only a problem if you take a selfish, America-centric view. The ISDS is good because it means *we* can sue *Vietnam* if *they* pass a law saying their companies can spew poison into the environment or pay child laborers starvation wages.

And there are *already* around 50 ISDS procedures in our existing trade agreements, and the terrible problems everyone is hysterical about (foreign companies suing us to overturn good regulations) simply don’t happen (and can’t: the ISDS can’t overturn laws, it can only impose fines).

Here are a few antidotes to what has sadly become practically anti-TPP fundamentalism on the left:

And then there’s this–an aside, but it’s fascinating: a great article highlighting the difficulty of pressuring other countries to protect their workers:
highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/the-myth-of-the-ethical-shopper

I want to apologize for how long it took to post this comment. For reasons I don’t understand, WordPress occasionally asks me to approve a comment, but usually doesn’t. (Maybe the number of links, which is a characteristic of spam? I don’t know.) It took me a while to notice this one and approve it. Sorry.

Doug — I’m not caught up — have you done an analysis on TPP? I’d like to hear what you have to say on it. I am under the impression that it enshrines in law the big corporations’ rights to profit no matter whom it hurts. Is that incorrect?